While reading Milton all day long, and looking up
From time to time, to wonder when it would stop,
And then forgetting rain, in the warm room where I sat.
Then arriving at the beach: yellow-brown breakers lit
From under a slowly lifting ledge of cloud -- the tops
Catching the level blaze, and darkness soon to drop,
And for my run the sand wave-beaten hard and fl at.
I ran alone, leaving some saunterers behind,
Beside a set of fresh footprints so far apart
I couldn't match them long, and slowed my pace, resigned;
Thinking of Milton, no, of every excellence,
How it exhilarates and humiliates the heart;
High waves nearing both sets of our footprints.